Painting with juvenile delinquents

Feb 21 2013

Bolshói Górod

Victoria Lomasko

Victoria Lomasko teaches painting lessons in juvenile detention centers and is currently working on a methods handbook for those who wish to follow her in this work. Lomasko explains how she got into this line of work and why it is important for juvenile delinquents to have such a link to the outside world.

One day, teenagers in the Mozhaysk Juvenile Detention
Center asked me what I was doing there and why I was teaching them. They said
that I was probably being paid a lot of money for my lessons, and they thought
there was something mysterious about it.

At first, I was curious to learn what prison life was like
and wanted to do some stylized drawings based on it. Then I became interested
in giving lessons to inmates — how could I organize drawing lessons here, in
this very specific environment? I developed a direct bond with the teenagers: I
knew who they were, knew that they had names and interests, and that they were
waiting for me.

Related:

Yet, I still never completely turned from an artist into a
social worker; an artist is focused on experiments and looking for themes that
have been previously unexplored.

When the painting curriculum for juvenile inmates is fully
completed, the project will be over. It is important for me to transform my
findings into a book, to make them useful for other volunteers who are ready to
work in juvenile detention centers.

What prisoners paint

Life in a juvenile detention center is like groundhog’s
day: there is a strict regime that must be followed. Some of the teenagers make
attempts at self-reflection, but they are completely isolated from a normal
life and are in some way frozen. They do not want to think or analyze, and
painting lessons can shake them up a bit, because it is very intense mental
work.

If you ask a juvenile inmate to draw whatever he wants,
most-likely, it will be prison-related. One of my students, Andrey, was very
good at painting what is called “stamps” — detailed drawings in a prison style
made on handkerchiefs or simple cloths. He was a respected “prison painter”
among the other teenagers.

At first, he disliked my lessons, because my assignments
contradicted his usual practice and he was not very successful. Andrey accused
me of making everyone paint with no emotional involvement — and so did others.
They would ask why I forced all these “forms” and “counter forms” on them.

For
them, painting with emotional involvement meant barbed wire around a heart or a
rose, a sun behind bars and naïve copies of icons. But then, when the Center
for Prison Restructuring published a calendar of paintings made by juveniles
and one of them was Andrey’s, he changed his attitude toward our classes.

In general, my students usually complain, saying they do
not know what to draw. They have forgotten about everything that was outside
the detention center; inside it there is nothing exciting. I explain to them how
boring, unpleasant or awful things can be turned into something exciting —
about featured drawings, albums made in cities under siege, war or prison
camps. After this they usually start taking a more attentive look around.

What prisoners dream about

Usually teachers should not ask teenagers what they were
sentenced for. Recently, however, clothing labels were changed to include the
article number [of the law] the inmates violated in their crime. There are
always students with very different conviction articles. One of my first
students, Oleg, was a skinhead who was convicted for a group murder.

The story went this way: a small city, Caucasian mafia,
teenage clashes. Oleg was a witness to the murder of his friend by teenagers
from the Caucasus. The latter were ever punished. Oleg decided to take revenge,
so he created a skinhead group that attacked Caucasian markets. He considered
himself a patriot: if the government wants to do nothing, he was going to do it
himself, he said.

We created an exhibit of the pictures made by the students,
including a picture by Oleg that depicted his crime. The exhibit was hosted by
one of Moscow’s leading schools. I listened to what high school students were
saying when attending the exhibit, and it turned out that a lot of them
supported Oleg’s attitudes.

They were shocked to learn that those in juvenile
detention centers were teenagers like them, but a lot of them shared those
nationalistic ideas. Of course, school students need to discuss issues like
this. But what can we tell them?

The future for inmates

We visit the detention center once a month. Every six
months the student composition is changed completely: some of them are
released, and others move on to adult prisons. This means that every student in
a group can attend no more than six lessons.

I think, among the students I have had over the last three
years, there have been at least five people who could have become artists if
the lessons continued.

Previously, inmates could stay in juvenile detention
centers until they turned 20 (or until 21 if they had no conduct violations).
Many managed to get out and not fall into the adult penitentiary system; but
now they feel that adult prisons await them and they prepare for them. The
juvenile inmates treat the detention center as a temporary stay where learning
is not mandatory. Instead, they feel they should master the prison laws and
jargon or get the right tattoos.

Indeed, juvenile detention centers lack people from outside
— lack that link to society outside the bars. When you go to a different
juvenile detention center that previously had no such lessons in place, you see
how difficult it is for teenagers to establish contact: they are not ready for
the lessons and cannot express their feelings. It is really hard to work in
such an environment — as if you are trying to break a wall with your head.

Victoria
Lomasko is a Russian artist who draws pictures of people in the arts. Usually
her subjects are those who have been involved in high-profile court cases, including
Pussy Riot band members and the organizers of the Forbidden Art exhibition.
During the political unrest in Russia in 2012, she depicted life in the regions
and presented illustrations of the protest activity in her Resistance
Chronicles project.